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Mari and colleagues listen to a teammate's "fail forward" presentation; GlobalGiving says that it... [+] celebrates both failures and success in the name of learning and improving.

(Photo by Alison Carlman)

Mari Kuraishi is the cofounder and president of GlobalGiving, the world’s first and largest global crowdfunding community, which she began in 2002. Sixteen years later, Mari has announced her intention to step down from her role at the end of this year, at a time where both she and GlobalGiving face exciting opportunities ahead. I have been on the board of GlobalGiving for the last six years and it’s been a privilege watching Mari grow as a leader and executive. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with her and chat about her biggest learning moments, her role in innovating how resources get to grassroots projects and her next chapter.

Fran Hauser: GlobalGiving has been recognized as one of the world's first crowdfunding platforms. Looking back on the past 16 years, what are you most proud of?

Mari Kuraishi: In about 2007 or so, about five years after our beta platform was launched, we started getting these calls from a nonprofit leader in Liberia named Sidi. We have a policy that everyone has to answer the phone if it’s ringing and they are in the offices, and Sidi called us so often that almost everyone in the office had talked to Sidi at one time or the other. He always called with the same question though — how could he raise more money on GlobalGiving? And after a while, we began to wonder, what was Sidi up to that he was calling so often with the same question? Was he up to no good? So, when one of our staff was visiting Liberia, we asked her to drop by and visit him. It wasn’t easy—she had to take all sorts of informal transportation out to his site—but when she got there she found out that he was the only person doing anything for the little village he lived in, and we were his primary source of funding. That’s why he was calling almost every day. He just wanted to make a difference in his community. That is one of the things I’m most proud of. We set out to build a platform that would reach the myriad unsung leaders working to make a difference in their communities. It wasn’t at all a foregone conclusion we’d be able to reach folks like Sidi.

Hauser: Why have you chosen to hand over the reins at this moment in time?

Kuraishi: Almost every other major decision I’ve taken in the past has been a “pull” decision. That is to say, I’ve moved to a different city, chosen a grad school, founded a new organization—pulled and attracted by the new opportunity that lay ahead. This is a “push” decision in that I don’t have anything lined up that I’m going to. So, it’s a conscious decision on my part that it’s time to go. I feel it is time to go because making the transition from a founder-leader to a non-founder leader is a milestone transition for any institution. And if it goes well, it’s a sign the organization has grown up and passed a test. And right now it feels like a really good time for GlobalGiving to put itself to the test. We had one of our biggest years last year, we are financially sound and the teamis awesome. It’s also the right time because if I stay on much longer, GlobalGiving might tip into becoming an institution so closely identified with its founder that it is diminished when the founder leaves. And finally, it’s also a good time for me. Coming off of success applies to me as much as to GlobalGiving and I feel ready to take on new challenges.

Hauser: What have been your biggest learning moments in leading your team?

Kuraishi: When I first started out professionally, I was dead set on getting things right and turning in the best possible deliverable I could. Which is not a bad orientation—it helps cement a reputation with your boss and your teammates that you’re someone to be relied on to get it right the first time, a low-maintenance employee. But as you go up the ladder of leadership, “getting things right” isn’t always an option, because you start encountering problems that don’t have neat solutions. And as you go up that same ladder of leadership, it increasingly isn’t about solving problems, but it is about spotting an opportunity or even creating the conditions for favorable opportunities — what you might call luck. Yes, luck is random, but the ability to capitalize on luck isn’t necessarily random. And your day-to-day tasks remain the same (you still have to check your emails for typos!) but the broader sweep of what you do is not anywhere as simple as getting things right and turning in a good product. It’s about steering the ship to the right place to catch the wind, it’s making sure that your crew are in peak form and motivated, and recognizing when the ride might be bumpier than anyone would like, but being sure that your destination is still out there beyond the storm.

Hauser: If you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself and Dennis in 2002? Is there anything you would have done differently?

Kuraishi: I think I would tell both of us to not be so hard on ourselves. Which still feels, even with the benefit of hindsight, a dangerous thing to say. I know that in the moment(s), everything we were doing — whether it was writing (many) unreturned emails, obsessing over the performance of the website, slaving over funding proposals — felt like do or die. And almost every defeat (of which there were many along the way) felt like a personal failure. I know today many were not personal failures, and that some “wins” might have actually taken us off course from the success we enjoy today. Is it possible to be a Zen entrepreneur? Or if we were that Zen, would we still have ventured to start crowdsourcing even before the terms crowdfunding or crowdsourcing had been invented?

Hauser:What do you think the biggest opportunity is in transforming how resources get to grassroots projects?

Kuraishi: I think we are on the cusp of a couple of big shifts that could transform the way resources get to grassroots projects. First, I think the way we connect with people, including strangers, will become more instantaneous, and more real. What if you were entering a cafe to pick up lunch and as you looked at the menu your phone buzzed and asked you, “While you’re at it, do you want to pick up lunch for Angelique in Haiti too?” and flashed an augmented reality image of her with her lunch right next to you? Wouldn’t that make you feel so much more connected to Angelique and her school? Second, I think fintech is being seriously transformed right now—blockchain isn’t the only disruptive technology out there—so that in fact if you did decide to buy Angelique lunch, it might make it to the school lunch budget pretty much instantaneously. And you might, if you had time left after your lunch, be able to walk around Angelique’s school virtually. And these technologies will be transformative if and only if they allow us to make closer connections between people. And they could.

Hauser: How are you feeling as you enter into this next chapter of your life and career? What is the one thing you are most excited about?

Kuraishi:I remember thinking as I entered my 30s that whatever I had been led to believe about my twenties being the best time of my life was wrong. Not that my 20s hadn’t been fun or filled with amazing experiences. But I had a lot more confidence and conviction in my 30s than I did in my 20s — so much so I co-founded GlobalGiving in my 30s. I feel a bit like that again today. I feel that I have learned so much, that I have proven so many things to myself and to others and gotten to know so many amazing people that I have another layer of confidence and conviction to draw upon.

As for what I’m most excited about, I think I am most excited about the prospect of jumping into something new, working in a place I’ve never worked before, working on something I don’t yet know much about, venturing into networks I am still on the fringes of. There is one thing I’ve figured out about myself, which is that I love to learn

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